It's not like he did a sham transfer to a strawman. He transferred them to his foundation, irrevocably. Just because the foundation has his name doesn't mean he gets anything from it.
Well, technically he could make himself a board member of that foundation (if he isn't already), give himself a massive salary, etc...
After all, trusts and foundations are among the oldest tax dodges in financial history, you know?
PR people are a lot cheaper than billion dollar foundations.
True, but PR people can't effectively bribe 3rd-world governments into avoiding Linux and buying Windows - at least not as much as you can with "donations" from your "charity" to El Presidente's wife's own "charity". See also Mexico.
And PR for what? A retired guy? Who cares?
He's not quite retired, eh?
If this was a PR move why keep it going?
For highly-driven people, retirement doesn't mean saying 'aww screw it' and letting one's entire life's work to do whatever it wants to. Doubly so if the vast majority of your money is tied up in the continued stock/corporate performance of that life's work. Hence the palm-greasing on the side, the PR designed to make sure his company looks as good as he does when he writes those big-assed checks, etc etc.
Note that I haven't even touched on the ego aspect of it all...
Also note that he isn't the first to do this: Andrew Carnegie did it because as an older man, he realized his afterlife and name were in serious jeopardy of being snuffed out and/or dragged through the mud once he wasn't around to enforce the respect that he enjoyed.
In the end he is giving.
Certainly he is - though only for his own goals and purposes. Otherwise, it would be a whole helluva lot easier (and way more efficient) to simply write a ginormous check or two to UNICEF, CRS, CARE, Red Cross/Crescent, or a whole host of other existing and effective charities.
Mind you, I'm not being a troll, nor am I dismissing the principles behind what they're doing. However, I am wondering how long it'll stay 'pure' before the user realizes "hey, I can't run $favorite_item, even though it normally runs fine on Linux!"
I suspect that those few who bother will likely give up and park Ubuntu/Fedora/SomethingElse on it in very short order.
(won't even touch on the fact that it's an older spec...)
I find that I usually have to look up at least two different sources, plus at least one non-US source (my faves: RT, BBC, Deutsche Welle) and at least one alt-media source (*not* an ideologically-driven one) to get a semi-coherent picture of the truth behind a given story I find interesting.
There is one bit, though: I don't think the US media is doing it for a given propaganda track per se (though it is rapidly approaching that), but instead I think it's an organic result of the $media_corporation drive for eyeballs, thus advertising dollars. This is why a typical cable show's primetime slots are packed with crap that feeds off of the drama and controversy, instead of trying to get at the actual facts and heart of a given story. It's why you have the likes of, say, Nancy Grace on CNN making her paycheck off the corpses of dead kids, MSNBC sneering at anyone who dares to besmirch their idol in the White House, and FOX shouting full-throttle that that same White House occupant is a combination of Stalin and the Antichrist (albeit wearing a better suit). Each channel is shaping their chosen demographic, and stoking them up so they can jack up the rates for advertisers.
But then, I suspect it's part of the grand civilizational cycle - rise, peak, fall. We (the world, mind, since we're a lot more global than most folks realize) are somewhere near the peak IMHO, though I'll be damned if I can say for certain which side of that peak we're on.
Doesn't matter - like most jurisdictions, if a business has a physical presence in a given area, they can be sued and are subject to the laws in that area. Odds are pretty good that Google has a physical presence at least somewhere in the UK, so...
It does come down to that, but only almost. When you consider what it takes to dink around with VPC, along with other infrastructure integration hassles (not to mention the sysadmin's time in ramping-up and dealing with them)? It can get pricey in a hurry. Gets even worse when you have a *nix-heavy environment, and discover that unless you want to jump through a ton of hoops, you can only migrate 'doze server 2003/8 VMs to it.
Now as a cold-start remote DR site that you build-up (say, leave your DB on in there to replicate data from prod while the other instances sleep)? It's not a completely bad way to go. In my case, I already have a colo and an existing infrastructure that I can move the thing into, so my costs will actually drop by quite a bit.
All said and done? My biggest (and TBH only real) complaint is the semi-hidden costs that AWS barfs on you after you get stuff up and running. Unless you know them first-hand (or get really lucky digging through the paperwork while in the estimation stage), you can be very easily bitten by the nickle-and-dime stuff (as my predecessor was bitten, unfortunately).
Nope, but I do have to deal with it on a daily basis...
Cloud pricing is insane (and insanely complex) because otherwise the vendor wouldn't make any real money off of it.
Take AWS for instance. Sure, the spot pricing is cheap as hell. Well, it would be, if they didn't charge you $0.11/GB-hour for storage, a penny-fraction for every 10,000 GET requests you receive (and a similar price for every 1,000 PUT/form requests), and a zillion other nickel-and-dime charges that turn a forecasted $300/mo. estimate into a $3200/mo. OpEx ( for five moderately-busy servers w/ a small DB... basically a smallish-sized commercial website).
I know this because I just inherited one of these. My predecessor promised cheap, I'm stuck with managing expensive (and am moving the #$@! thing back into our existing colo space as soon as I can practically do so...)
If you're going to put stuff on a timeline, then you have to add OpEx to the costs; given that Oracle had a hand in it, that's gonna be one expensive mother...
GP is half-ignorant: The "blue" portions of Oregon are centered around Multnomah, Marion, and Deschutes counties (Portland, Salem, and Bend, respectively.) The rest of the counties range from a mixture of the two (esp. in suburbs and along the coast), to deep "red" (usually along the southern and eastern portions of the state.)
As for your post - correct! The money ultimately got funneled to California - most likely to fund Larry Ellison's new yacht or somesuch.
What would possess someone (esp. my own state government) to go with Oracle, a company known for databases (and not websites) to build a website is beyond belief; I would not be surprised at this point if news got out that the state government (and more than a few legislators) didn't get a few kickbacks out of it.
Personally, I'm wondering how this law firm got the contact addresses.
Odds are perfect they chased IP addys, combined them with date+time stamps, then got the ISPs to help them out in that regard; it's pretty much the only way they could get much of anything like that. Now whether the ISPs helped out due to some German equivalent of the DMCA (or suchlike) or were paid to? Dunno...
Can't blame you, considering that the folks doing the harassing are Swiss (and thus not even based in an EU member nation, so even that can't be used as an excuse).
Out of morbid curiosity - who uploaded the content, and why isn't the law firm chasing that guy? Oh, nevermind... bigger (and TBH, more reliable) revenue stream from chasing the poor horny bastards who sucked down the content instead.
Lesson for the folks in Germany... proxies are your friend.
Certainly, Atheism has no formal organization, but neither do many religions (see also "Wicca" as an example), so that cannot be a usable guideline. But there is even more damning evidence here: Atheism does have "saints" and "preachers" (e.g. Mr. Dawkins), it does have a dogma (centered around a fairly particular definition of "reason" as its central coda, I believe, yes?), and it certainly have its zealots (oftentimes more irritating than Mormon/JV missionaries, truth be told.) Also, they seem to have the same smug self-assurance that many religious folks carry.
Finally, your very post says (without specifically saying) point-blank that Atheism has very little tolerance for anything that may intrude into the full exercise of its tenets.
I daresay that there are times when Atheism is just as much of a religion as, well, a mainstream religious organization; with some people, it is even moreso.
Now, here's the deal from my POV: I happen to be Catholic, by birth and creed. I don't advertise it beyond disclosure here in this post, or when specifically asked - and I certainly don't go door-to-door or jam it down anyone's throat. I say as much because I'm here to tell you right now that you and I are only really different in philosophies, and in what we believe about those things which are beyond our 5-dimensioned realm (six if you count mathematics;) ).
I guess I should also inform you that it gets "dragged" into {$arena} because at one time, it resided there. Take the schools for instance. Given the rise in violence, the fall of scholastic performance, and the outright degradation of character in our youth since religion left said schools says way too much about what its replacement has wrought, IMHO. Can't blame someone for thinking that maybe its return might fix a few broken things. If you have a better idea or two about how to fix these mounting woes, then let's hear them...
Finally, your statement that the Bible is "a book that tells them whatever they do is right and the will of whatever deity they worship." tells me that you have never actually read it, and are thus speaking in ignorance. The book is nothing of the sort, in spite of too-often being used as such by people with ill intent.
Do you think every crime is as black and white as the premise... don't you have the slightest bit of imagination?
You make the mistake of focusing on motivation instead of the action. There is no justifiable motivation for what they did, period.
Let me make it very simple for you: You forfeit your life the moment you directly threaten death upon any innocent person, no matter the reason or motivation. If you manage to get away with your act, but get yourself killed for reasons directly related to that act, then I hold no sympathy for you.
There is no call for capital punishment on a carjacker. However, if a couple of them die painfully after giving a couple of innocent folks a severe beating, doing so at gunpoint, and all because they were too dumbassed to ignore the warnings splayed all over the container?
I really cannot bring myself to feel bad about the outcome.
For those who feel otherwise, look at it this way: When you use a lethal weapon to commit a crime, you state to the world that you are willing to kill innocent people in order to get what you want, no matter what. From the moment when you point that gun at someone, your life is automatically forfeit should you die as a result of committing that crime. It doesn't matter if you died instantly because the victim shot back, or because every orifice you have is slowly bleeding out of your swollen body due to radiation exposure... you got what was coming to you.
Oh, you're dying a painful death from the stuff you stole and some bleeding-heart type on Slashdot says I should show you some sympathy? Okay: you'll find sympathy in the dictionary between "shit" and "syphilis".
On the plus side, maybe the next person contemplating violent acts to get what they want will think twice because of these two Darwin Award winners?
Yes and no... nowadays, with mandatory reporting in some cases, and every newly unemployed developer on the planet able to post to any number of disclosure lists, I'm not seeing too many management types left these days that would take such a stupid risk.
All that, and it wouldn't hurt to print off copies of those emails (and his responses!) and take those home for personal storage. That way, if poop-meets-fan and they suddenly perp-walk you out (before you have a chance to reach for your backups or suchlike) you still have usable documentation - this is in case any governmental authorities get involved, a lawsuit springs from it, etc..
Printing also gives you the advantage of having backups that you can walk out of the building with and not set off any alarms, since many tightly-regulated companies lock down the use of USB sticks, external hard disks, and etc. (my last employer -- a web-banking software house-- would literally fire you on the spot if you got caught using a geek stick or external drive on their desk/laptop equipment or servers - at least if you do it w/o prior written manager authorization and only on authorized devices.)
To top that off, the printed copies are protection against an 'oops - our retention is only set to two weeks and the backups were corrupted somehow; sorry, sucker!' move. F500 firms generally blow away anything in the inbox that's more than a couple of weeks old anyway, so if you forget to archive it off to a.pst or another folder, it's usually gone by week 3, with no recourse.
Meanwhile, it wouldn't hurt to have a bit of a side conversation with someone in legal (for a start), then escalate it to formal conversations with them via email (again, print those suckers off) should nothing get resolved.
Slashdot Mirror
Well played indeed!
Be grateful it didn't come with HURD.
It's not like he did a sham transfer to a strawman. He transferred them to his foundation, irrevocably. Just because the foundation has his name doesn't mean he gets anything from it.
Well, technically he could make himself a board member of that foundation (if he isn't already), give himself a massive salary, etc...
After all, trusts and foundations are among the oldest tax dodges in financial history, you know?
PR people are a lot cheaper than billion dollar foundations.
True, but PR people can't effectively bribe 3rd-world governments into avoiding Linux and buying Windows - at least not as much as you can with "donations" from your "charity" to El Presidente's wife's own "charity". See also Mexico.
And PR for what? A retired guy? Who cares?
He's not quite retired, eh?
If this was a PR move why keep it going?
For highly-driven people, retirement doesn't mean saying 'aww screw it' and letting one's entire life's work to do whatever it wants to. Doubly so if the vast majority of your money is tied up in the continued stock/corporate performance of that life's work. Hence the palm-greasing on the side, the PR designed to make sure his company looks as good as he does when he writes those big-assed checks, etc etc.
Note that I haven't even touched on the ego aspect of it all...
Also note that he isn't the first to do this: Andrew Carnegie did it because as an older man, he realized his afterlife and name were in serious jeopardy of being snuffed out and/or dragged through the mud once he wasn't around to enforce the respect that he enjoyed.
In the end he is giving.
Certainly he is - though only for his own goals and purposes. Otherwise, it would be a whole helluva lot easier (and way more efficient) to simply write a ginormous check or two to UNICEF, CRS, CARE, Red Cross/Crescent, or a whole host of other existing and effective charities.
...what can you do on it besides run gcc?
Mind you, I'm not being a troll, nor am I dismissing the principles behind what they're doing. However, I am wondering how long it'll stay 'pure' before the user realizes "hey, I can't run $favorite_item, even though it normally runs fine on Linux!"
I suspect that those few who bother will likely give up and park Ubuntu/Fedora/SomethingElse on it in very short order.
(won't even touch on the fact that it's an older spec...)
Re: the media... yup - sad, but mostly true.
I find that I usually have to look up at least two different sources, plus at least one non-US source (my faves: RT, BBC, Deutsche Welle) and at least one alt-media source (*not* an ideologically-driven one) to get a semi-coherent picture of the truth behind a given story I find interesting.
There is one bit, though: I don't think the US media is doing it for a given propaganda track per se (though it is rapidly approaching that), but instead I think it's an organic result of the $media_corporation drive for eyeballs, thus advertising dollars. This is why a typical cable show's primetime slots are packed with crap that feeds off of the drama and controversy, instead of trying to get at the actual facts and heart of a given story. It's why you have the likes of, say, Nancy Grace on CNN making her paycheck off the corpses of dead kids, MSNBC sneering at anyone who dares to besmirch their idol in the White House, and FOX shouting full-throttle that that same White House occupant is a combination of Stalin and the Antichrist (albeit wearing a better suit). Each channel is shaping their chosen demographic, and stoking them up so they can jack up the rates for advertisers.
But then, I suspect it's part of the grand civilizational cycle - rise, peak, fall. We (the world, mind, since we're a lot more global than most folks realize) are somewhere near the peak IMHO, though I'll be damned if I can say for certain which side of that peak we're on.
Doesn't matter - like most jurisdictions, if a business has a physical presence in a given area, they can be sued and are subject to the laws in that area. Odds are pretty good that Google has a physical presence at least somewhere in the UK, so...
Gotta give 'em credit for Chutzpah, though.
Funny thing is, the language in this case isn't so much "inflammatory", as much as it is descriptive. See also The Memory Hole.
(I wonder if NoKo actually calls the folks tasked with this job the Korean equivalent of "Ministry of Truth" as well...)
Dude - the head of the Portland school district pulls in wages and benefits that would put most CEOs to shame (around $200k/year, IIRC).
So a $300m website isn't really much to blink at, especially when you consider that a huge percentage of the money came in as federal pork.
It does come down to that, but only almost. When you consider what it takes to dink around with VPC, along with other infrastructure integration hassles (not to mention the sysadmin's time in ramping-up and dealing with them)? It can get pricey in a hurry. Gets even worse when you have a *nix-heavy environment, and discover that unless you want to jump through a ton of hoops, you can only migrate 'doze server 2003/8 VMs to it.
Now as a cold-start remote DR site that you build-up (say, leave your DB on in there to replicate data from prod while the other instances sleep)? It's not a completely bad way to go. In my case, I already have a colo and an existing infrastructure that I can move the thing into, so my costs will actually drop by quite a bit.
All said and done? My biggest (and TBH only real) complaint is the semi-hidden costs that AWS barfs on you after you get stuff up and running. Unless you know them first-hand (or get really lucky digging through the paperwork while in the estimation stage), you can be very easily bitten by the nickle-and-dime stuff (as my predecessor was bitten, unfortunately).
Nope, but I do have to deal with it on a daily basis...
Cloud pricing is insane (and insanely complex) because otherwise the vendor wouldn't make any real money off of it.
Take AWS for instance. Sure, the spot pricing is cheap as hell. Well, it would be, if they didn't charge you $0.11/GB-hour for storage, a penny-fraction for every 10,000 GET requests you receive (and a similar price for every 1,000 PUT/form requests), and a zillion other nickel-and-dime charges that turn a forecasted $300/mo. estimate into a $3200/mo. OpEx ( for five moderately-busy servers w/ a small DB... basically a smallish-sized commercial website).
I know this because I just inherited one of these. My predecessor promised cheap, I'm stuck with managing expensive (and am moving the #$@! thing back into our existing colo space as soon as I can practically do so...)
Agreed - one simply cannot win a statewide election without winning at least two of the big three left-leaning cities.
If you're going to put stuff on a timeline, then you have to add OpEx to the costs; given that Oracle had a hand in it, that's gonna be one expensive mother...
GP is half-ignorant: The "blue" portions of Oregon are centered around Multnomah, Marion, and Deschutes counties (Portland, Salem, and Bend, respectively.) The rest of the counties range from a mixture of the two (esp. in suburbs and along the coast), to deep "red" (usually along the southern and eastern portions of the state.)
As for your post - correct! The money ultimately got funneled to California - most likely to fund Larry Ellison's new yacht or somesuch.
What would possess someone (esp. my own state government) to go with Oracle, a company known for databases (and not websites) to build a website is beyond belief; I would not be surprised at this point if news got out that the state government (and more than a few legislators) didn't get a few kickbacks out of it.
The two people running it are Germans - it's not clear why their company is in Switzerland.
Likely because Switzerland is not an EU member, and thus businesses based there aren't under the EU microscope as much?
Personally, I'm wondering how this law firm got the contact addresses.
Odds are perfect they chased IP addys, combined them with date+time stamps, then got the ISPs to help them out in that regard; it's pretty much the only way they could get much of anything like that. Now whether the ISPs helped out due to some German equivalent of the DMCA (or suchlike) or were paid to? Dunno...
Can't blame you, considering that the folks doing the harassing are Swiss (and thus not even based in an EU member nation, so even that can't be used as an excuse).
Out of morbid curiosity - who uploaded the content, and why isn't the law firm chasing that guy? Oh, nevermind... bigger (and TBH, more reliable) revenue stream from chasing the poor horny bastards who sucked down the content instead.
Lesson for the folks in Germany... proxies are your friend.
Well, one question:
how much longer do you think that will be true?
Certainly, Atheism has no formal organization, but neither do many religions (see also "Wicca" as an example), so that cannot be a usable guideline. But there is even more damning evidence here: Atheism does have "saints" and "preachers" (e.g. Mr. Dawkins), it does have a dogma (centered around a fairly particular definition of "reason" as its central coda, I believe, yes?), and it certainly have its zealots (oftentimes more irritating than Mormon/JV missionaries, truth be told.) Also, they seem to have the same smug self-assurance that many religious folks carry.
Finally, your very post says (without specifically saying) point-blank that Atheism has very little tolerance for anything that may intrude into the full exercise of its tenets.
I daresay that there are times when Atheism is just as much of a religion as, well, a mainstream religious organization; with some people, it is even moreso.
Now, here's the deal from my POV: I happen to be Catholic, by birth and creed. I don't advertise it beyond disclosure here in this post, or when specifically asked - and I certainly don't go door-to-door or jam it down anyone's throat. I say as much because I'm here to tell you right now that you and I are only really different in philosophies, and in what we believe about those things which are beyond our 5-dimensioned realm (six if you count mathematics ;) ).
I guess I should also inform you that it gets "dragged" into {$arena} because at one time, it resided there. Take the schools for instance. Given the rise in violence, the fall of scholastic performance, and the outright degradation of character in our youth since religion left said schools says way too much about what its replacement has wrought, IMHO. Can't blame someone for thinking that maybe its return might fix a few broken things. If you have a better idea or two about how to fix these mounting woes, then let's hear them...
Finally, your statement that the Bible is "a book that tells them whatever they do is right and the will of whatever deity they worship." tells me that you have never actually read it, and are thus speaking in ignorance. The book is nothing of the sort, in spite of too-often being used as such by people with ill intent.
Do you think every crime is as black and white as the premise... don't you have the slightest bit of imagination?
You make the mistake of focusing on motivation instead of the action. There is no justifiable motivation for what they did, period.
Let me make it very simple for you: You forfeit your life the moment you directly threaten death upon any innocent person, no matter the reason or motivation. If you manage to get away with your act, but get yourself killed for reasons directly related to that act, then I hold no sympathy for you.
Does that same reasoning apply to law enforcement officers upholding the law?
If they pull a gun on an innocent person with the intent of depriving that innocent person of property, yes.
This, right here.
There is no call for capital punishment on a carjacker. However, if a couple of them die painfully after giving a couple of innocent folks a severe beating, doing so at gunpoint, and all because they were too dumbassed to ignore the warnings splayed all over the container?
I really cannot bring myself to feel bad about the outcome.
For those who feel otherwise, look at it this way: When you use a lethal weapon to commit a crime, you state to the world that you are willing to kill innocent people in order to get what you want, no matter what. From the moment when you point that gun at someone, your life is automatically forfeit should you die as a result of committing that crime. It doesn't matter if you died instantly because the victim shot back, or because every orifice you have is slowly bleeding out of your swollen body due to radiation exposure... you got what was coming to you.
Oh, you're dying a painful death from the stuff you stole and some bleeding-heart type on Slashdot says I should show you some sympathy? Okay: you'll find sympathy in the dictionary between "shit" and "syphilis".
On the plus side, maybe the next person contemplating violent acts to get what they want will think twice because of these two Darwin Award winners?
Agreed. Always line up the ducks before you go shooting.
Yes and no... nowadays, with mandatory reporting in some cases, and every newly unemployed developer on the planet able to post to any number of disclosure lists, I'm not seeing too many management types left these days that would take such a stupid risk.
All that, and it wouldn't hurt to print off copies of those emails (and his responses!) and take those home for personal storage. That way, if poop-meets-fan and they suddenly perp-walk you out (before you have a chance to reach for your backups or suchlike) you still have usable documentation - this is in case any governmental authorities get involved, a lawsuit springs from it, etc..
Printing also gives you the advantage of having backups that you can walk out of the building with and not set off any alarms, since many tightly-regulated companies lock down the use of USB sticks, external hard disks, and etc. (my last employer -- a web-banking software house-- would literally fire you on the spot if you got caught using a geek stick or external drive on their desk/laptop equipment or servers - at least if you do it w/o prior written manager authorization and only on authorized devices.)
To top that off, the printed copies are protection against an 'oops - our retention is only set to two weeks and the backups were corrupted somehow; sorry, sucker!' move. F500 firms generally blow away anything in the inbox that's more than a couple of weeks old anyway, so if you forget to archive it off to a .pst or another folder, it's usually gone by week 3, with no recourse.
Meanwhile, it wouldn't hurt to have a bit of a side conversation with someone in legal (for a start), then escalate it to formal conversations with them via email (again, print those suckers off) should nothing get resolved.
This will really come in handy after the big meltdown, when we have to re-engineer these vessels to set off for Iscandar.
Dude - you need a battleship for that. All of the starships in the Yamato/StarBlazers series were based on battleship designs, not submarines.
(otherwise, where the hell do you think you're gonna put the cool gun turrets? *Think*, man!)